Test of Metal

TEZZERET

I shoved myself up to my knees, but my heaving chest and trembling legs wouldn’t let me rise the rest of the way.

“You think we could have cut that a little closer?” Doc said. “Not like we were in a hurry or anything.”

“Doc, please.” I squeezed my eyes shut and set my hands upon my temples, trying to squeeze the whirl in my mind down to a manageable torrent. “If we weren’t in a hurry then, we certainly are now.”

“In a hurry to do what? Take a nap while we wait for Bolas?”

“Screw Bolas.”

“You first.”

I’d brought no actual tools into the Glass Desert, but the fabric of my tunic and breeches could be cut and braided into a variety of useful types of rope, and the leather of my boots could be useful for strapping. But best of all were the steel of the toe caps and the strap that stiffened the sole, not to mention the grommets. As soon as I thought of this, however, I realized my feet were cold. Worse, I could feel the texture of the sangrite crystals with my toes.

Opening my eyes confirmed my analysis. “Naked? Really? You couldn’t have even left me my boots?”

“Complain to management,” Doc said. “I was designed as a fail-safe, not an ejector seat.”

I let it go; we had no time to bicker. “Twenty minutes,” I said grimly. Without tools.

“Twenty minutes till what?”

“Renn dialed us back along my subjective time line so he could get at me before I made the armor. He couldn’t have attacked Baltrice while I was standing there; I had turned away from her only a few seconds before you smelled the blood and smoke.”

“What happened to her, then? Why was she gone and Renn there?”

“It’s possible Renn was talking to us from our future. Did you notice how black the blood was? And the smoke odor was too faint. On his time line, he might be hours ahead of us-maybe days.”

“What, he was talking to us from after he takes out Baltrice? After he’s going to take out Baltrice? Something like that.”

“Yes. Me-us-too.”

“So in our time line, he hasn’t attacked her yet? Even though in his, he grabbed her days ago?”

“My best guess,” I said, “based on how long it seemed to take from when I began the armor to the moment that our eye-and-ear link went dead, he will attack her in just about twenty minutes.”

“Clockworkers give me a headache.”

“Yes.”

“So you think we can get there in time to warn her, or something?”

“Or something.”

“Hey-hey now, you’re not thinking about actually being there, are you? Tezz, come on, are you nuts? The guy just yanked us backward in time. You want to fight him?”

“No,” I said. “I want to beat him.”

“To save Baltrice?”

“And myself. And you.”

“I don’t get it. Seriously. We can just sit here. Bolas’ll show up to kick us out again, and he can broker a deal with Vess, and we’re in. Crap, Tezz, we might be able to get Bolas to step on Renn-that way we don’t get the snot beat out of us. Or get killed.”

“Baltrice doesn’t have that much time.”

“So?”

That brought me to a full stop. So indeed. “Don’t you like her?”

“Do I need to remind you that she’s tried to kill us at least once already this week?”

“To protect Jace,” I said. “She can’t help it. I don’t hold it against her.”

“Well, I do. Let the fat cow die. Our business is Crucius.”

“We need Baltrice,” I insisted. “We need her.”

“Oh, I get it,” he said. “Whether I like her doesn’t matter. You like her.”

I frowned. “Apparently I do,” I said slowly. “But that’s not the issue.”

“I don’t give a ten-pound bucket of rat poo what you think the issue is. Maybe I can’t stop you once crap starts-but I can stop you from starting it yourself.” He underlined his point with a vividly distinct sensation of having my testicles ripped away.

I took it with no more reaction than an involuntary tightening around my eyes. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

“Think I can’t?”

“Doc, listen to me. I don’t have time to explain. I need you on my side for this. It’ll be worth it. I promise.”

“This what? What’s gonna be worth risking both our lives?”

“It’s kind of a…” I took a deep breath. Might as well tell him the truth. “It’s a practical joke.”

“You’re pulling our leg.”

“On Bolas,” I said. “It’s a practical joke on Nicol Bolas. A good one.”

“How good?”

“Let’s put it this way: If rage doesn’t make his head explode on the spot, he’ll have to suck it up and pretend he likes it. He’ll have to thank us.”

“Wow.”

“Are you in?”

“You should have told me this in the first place,” he said. “Sorry about the nut sack thing.”

“No harm done.” Which was, after all, only the truth. “Can you keep time?”

“I’m supposed to be a clockworker?”

“No. Count time. Specifically: seconds.”

“You mean like ‘one Vectis, two Vectis’? Sure. How many seconds?”

Allowing for three minutes of recovering from the teleport and bickering with Doc, discovering I was naked and getting my thoughts organized, plus perhaps thirty seconds of sag time for final adjustments…

“Nine hundred and ninety.”

“Starting?”

“Now.”

“One Vectis. Good thing I don’t lithp. Three Vectis, four Vectis-”

“Silently.”

“Check. Sorry.” His voice evaporated into blessed silence.

An unsentimental appraisal of the odds against me was not encouraging. Last time, I couldn’t even get out of this cavern without help. I had no way to know if Baltrice was still at her sled by the transit gate. I had no way to know if she was free or captured, fighting or already dead. I knew for sure only one thing.

I knew where Silas Renn would be in twenty minutes.

I have come to think of myself as a resourceful person; in fact, I have flattered myself into believing that given a specific problem, a specific time frame, and specific materials, I can deliver not only an effective solution, but an elegantly creative one.

I had about sixteen minutes to prove I haven’t been kidding myself.

I arranged myself into a rough simulacrum of a comfortable position and applied my full attention to the problem. Unfortunately, this specific problem was a long-standing one, and one to which I had never achieved any working solution at all. Three years of trial and error. Mostly the latter. Three years of hypotheses and experiments, resulting only in bruises and humiliation. Disgrace. Expulsion, and murder… but I couldn’t think about that now; dwelling on my failures was diversion. Distraction. Nothing more than an excuse to lose. I didn’t need an excuse.

I needed to win.

Getting away unharmed had been a victory in itself, though I could take no credit for that. I had escaped because he didn’t know about Doc. What else could I do that Renn didn’t know I could?

It was imponderable. I shook my head and moved on. Everything in its turn. First: escape. If I couldn’t get out of the cavern, any tactical plan was moot.

This cavern had already proven to be secure against my best efforts. I had been unable to reach the Blind Eternities after awakening here, and now I found that an attempt to teleport proved equally futile. Something about the sangrite not only blocked my mana channels, but seemed to absorb mana directly; opening more channels only brightened the blood-colored light in the cavern.

So: sangrite is a mana sink. Not just stored energy, but actually gathering energy every instant it remained untapped. A lot of energy, I reminded myself, in view of what had happened to the sculler in Tidehollow, not to mention the two mercenaries at my father’s hovel. I needed that power. I needed to harness it somehow.

Without making myself explode.

Dragon’s blood, Bolas had said. Spilled in mortal combat. Stress hormones and glucose. I pondered briefly whom Bolas had killed here, but only briefly. The blood’s original owner was no concern of mine. He lost it. I found it. The end.

But I wished I could ask him a question or two.

A quick search of the cavern failed to locate any sangrite chunks broken loose from ceiling or wall. A brief but painful attempt to yank or kick some free ended with me limping away on a bleeding foot… but then a sputtering sizzle ignited behind me, and my naked back registered sharply painful heat. I looked over my shoulder.

The floor had erupted into blinding fountains of raw power as high as my chest, like the insides of blast furnaces fueled by mana. Several, in fact.

Every spot where I had set my bleeding foot.

Interesting. Soluble in blood. Soluble in other fluids as well? “Doc. What’s the count?”

“Two hundred eighty-six Vectis, two hundred eight-seven Vectis.”

“Good. Keep on it.” I frowned, disturbed with myself, because without any logical reason I could imagine, I felt that he deserved at least a warning. “Doc, listen. You’ll want to pull back from my sensory nerves, if you still can. Some of this may hurt. A lot.”

“Two hundred ninety-five Vectis. Thanks, Tezz. You’re a pal. Two hundred ninety-eight Vectis.”

Apparently I am, I thought. What a strange person I had become. And getting stranger as I went.

The blood smears on the floor burned themselves out in seconds. I bit down on my tongue to fill my mouth with saliva, which I promptly spit on the floor. After wasting a few seconds waiting for an ignition that never came, I smeared the spittle with one hand and could detect no change in viscosity, coloration, or temperature, which led me to the conclusion that spit lacked some essential characteristic necessary to the reaction. Still, sangrite had dissolved and ignited in the bare smears of blood; it was possible that sangrite’s structure might be similar to rock sugar, halite, or similarly soluble minerals.

So I tasted it.

I went over to a wall and gave it a cautious lick-it would be unfortunate if I discovered sharp edges in the deposit by setting my tongue on fire-and found that it had no flavor at all that I could detect. Not so soluble as I’d hoped; it seemed the reaction was blood to blood. Crystal to liquid, and liquid to crystal.

Eating the stuff seemed to be out of the question. Injection was problematic; if the sangrite dissolved only in blood, there seemed to be no way to liquefy it without causing catastrophic ignition. The closest thing I had to a working hypothesis involved direct injection of intact crystals. But how could I even try it without making myself explode?

My only hope was to find or make crystals that were very, very small.

But without any sort of useful tool, how was I to make crystals small? I didn’t even have a chunk that I could knock against other chunks to flake off chips, nor did I have the ability to free such a chunk. If only I had a tool, any tool-or better yet, a couple of pounds of etherium-hells, with no more than an ounce or two of etherium, I could…

Wait.

I stood very, very still. Thinking.

I discovered I was smiling. One answer that solves three problems.

That’s elegance.

“Doc-the count.”

“Three hundred seventy Vectis.”

Less than nine minutes. Not enough time. Not nearly enough time.

It didn’t matter.

Standing nude in the center of the cavern, I closed my eyes and focused my will, and shortly there appeared in my perception a chaotic array of very, very faint points of energy, glowing faintly like stars on a misty night: a halo around my scalp, clustered around my groin, and scattered among my hands and feet. I fixed my attention to them each individually, and to them all generally, and pulled them out from under my skin.

It was a point of curiosity to me that now, here, where I struggled to intercept a catastrophe of monstrous proportion-one so dire and immediate that all the resources of the Infinite Consortium might not have sufficed-the tools I had to work with were those I’d acquired a lifetime ago, in my father’s Tidehollow hovel: my intellect, my clarity of purpose, and my talent for rhabdomancy.

Not to mention the tiny slivers and shards of etherium lodged under the skin of my scalp and groin, hands and feet, that were half-forgotten remnants of what I had stolen from my father.

Stolen is a stark word. Someone less devoted to precision than I would likely try to justify such a theft as some sort of moral necessity; I myself have been guilty of such. For many years I had thought of myself as a victim who had transformed himself into a clever rogue-hero like those of childhood fables, using ingenuity and patience to win freedom against impossible odds-and though that was exactly what I had done, at the same time, the unsentimental truth of the matter is that I had been only a clever thief. Worse than a thief: a bandit. A ripper.

I had used my mind instead of a weapon, but that was a distinction of style, not substance. Irrelevant to the truth.

Yes: my father was a bad man. Is a bad man. A drunkard, a wastrel, an addict, a violent abuser of my mother and myself-a figure of terror before he became one of contempt. And yet-

And yet there had been two things left in his life that he’d called his own: his tiny trade in etherium scraps, and his son the rhabdomant, who had kept him in business. And I had ripped them both forever beyond his grasp.

As he had taught me, all those years ago: whatever can be taken, will be taken.

I took from a man who’d had nothing else.

While I was contemplating this unflattering concept, I was also bringing forth all those residual shreds of etherium that had lingered under my skin all these years. Tiny spheres crawled across my skin like silvery mites, gathering themselves in the palm of my left hand, until finally they all joined into a single smooth ball, a half inch in diameter and weighing less than an ounce.

It would have to be enough.

A particularly bright fist-size sangrite protrusion from the nearby wall seemed a likely spot to test my idea. A brief inspection revealed several faults and fissures, one of which extended all the way to its surface near to its joining with the rest of the wall. I formed the etherium into a tiny needle, which I used to scratch open a vein in the back of my hand. Clenching my fist produced a satisfactory droplet of blood, small enough that I did not need to worry about it dripping on the floor and blowing one of my feet off. I stuck the end of the needle into the blood droplet, and with my mind thinned the needle while gradually hollowing an internal channel up its length. This produced a slight vacuum, enough to draw a little of my blood up within it, converting my needle to an etherium pipette.

I sealed the end of my pipette, and very carefully wiped the exterior. Inserting it as far as was practicable into the surface fissure of the protrusion, I caused the etherium to open and retract very briskly, so that I could step away before that portion of my blood inside the protrusion could react with the sangrite and detonate. Which it did.

With a stunningly intense crack! the sangrite protuberance exploded from the wall as though shot from a ballista. It hit the far wall, and the impact produced a shattering blast of raw power that lifted me from my feet and slammed me into the wall-fortunately without drawing blood.

Detonation on impact. Interesting. But inconvenient.

“YOW!” Doc exclaimed in my ear, louder even than the explosion. “Warn me when you’re gonna do something like that!”

“Doc,” I said, checking my bones as best I could for fractures, “I’m gonna do something like that.”

“Oh, very funny.”

“It’s not a joke.” I climbed back to my feet and stepped carefully over some fragments to locate a few tiny chips. I wet my finger and touched the smallest of the chips-a sliver less than half an inch long, and so thin that it looked clear. Folding my pipette into tweezers, I took the splinter and jammed it into the lateral side of my left butt cheek.

For what seemed like a terribly long time but was probably no more than a second or two, nothing happened-but then I felt a definite surge of energy from the splinter, for a bare instant before my ass caught fire.

Nothing actually exploded, which was a relief, but a patch of flesh almost an inch in diameter spit fire and poured black smoke and felt, for about five seconds, as if it was burning all the way into to my hip joint.

“Ow wow wow WOW!” Doc wailed. “You had to do it on the left side, didn’t you?”

“It’s good manners to share. What’s the count?”

“Are you kidding? After you set our butt on fire?”

Meat-scented smoke trailed up from a charred divot about the size of the end of my thumb. He wasn’t kidding: it hurt. It felt like someone was excavating my butt cheek with a red-hot spoon. And that was the good news. “Where were you when you lost track?”

“The late seven hundreds.”

“Not the answer I was hoping for.” Three minutes. I’d been right all along-not enough time. Not as much as I needed. No more tests. No more theories. This would either work, or it would kill me. Us.

I hate improvising. Hate it. Improvisation is for people too lazy or stupid to plan.

A group of stupid, lazy people that now included me.

I dropped to my knees at the edge of the scattered chips and splinters of sangrite. The cleavage appeared to be largely orthorhombic, which was fortunate-most fragments tended to be long and thin, like a crystal stylus. The problem was that the tiniest flakes seemed to be fading away-shrinking like sublimating dry ice. Which explained why I had found no existing fragments on my initial search. The damned stuff evaporates.

Why is it that nothing ever turns out to be easy?

I gathered as many of the medium-to-large crystals as I could fit into both hands and began to stick them into the only place where, first, I wouldn’t lose them, and second, I wouldn’t run the risk of having my colon explode; that is, I stuck them into the long tangles of my hair. Time pressure made my hands tremble, ever so slightly. I carefully kept the crystals away from my scalp, especially those with sharp edges, as having my head blast open would be only slightly less traumatic than full rectal detonation, and that only because I would be too dead to suffer.

And that was the easy part.

I found one crystal that had shrunk to two and a half inches long and about a tenth of an inch in diameter. I held it in the palm of my right hand, along with my tiny bead of etherium.

“What’s that for?”

“Shh. We’re not going to get a second try at this.”

I stared at the etherium bead. It rolled across my palm to the crystal of sangrite, then flowed over and around it, encasing the sangrite in metal. I then refined one end of the etherium to shape it into the sharpest, stiffest point that raw etherium could hold. That accomplished, I used the fingertips of my left hand to locate an intercostal space to the right of my sternum just above my heart, then brought my sangrite-filled needle there and put its point to my skin, the needle angling to aim behind my sternum.

“Um, Tezz? You mind telling me what you’re doing?”

“In a moment.”

“Seriously. What are you doing?”

“This.” With a sharp movement of my right thumb, I stabbed myself in the chest, driving the whole needle in as far as I could push.

“Ow! Damn it!”

“My thoughts exactly,” I gasped. The pain crushed my breath away-like being stabbed with a rusty gate latch. Must have inadvertently nicked a rib. “But… so far so good…”

“You say that like it’s going to get worse.”

“We met only days ago, yet it seems you’ve known me all your life.” I closed my eyes and wasted some few seconds settling my mind and summoning my concentration; a mistake in this part of the operation might kill us both.

Even if I did it right, it might kill us both.

I hate improvising.

I found the needle with my mind, and I induced tiny projections of etherium to stick out from its front end, then slowly creep along it to the rear, while at the same time causing smooth etherium to flow forward from the rear to become new projections-like a conveyor belt in reverse, or the linked-chain treads of a heavily armored vehicle. In sum, the effect was not unlike the scales of a snake. The threads gave the needle purchase on my surrounding tissue, so that it could pull itself slowly-agonizingly slowly-toward my aortal arch.

“Oh, crap,” Doc moaned. “Oh, you bastard. You do this to me on purpose-I apologized for your balls, didn’t I?”

“This is not…” Speech was difficult through the clench of my jaw. The needle felt bigger than my thumb and as though it was using fishhooks to claw its way through my chest. “… punishment. If even a tiny gap opens in the casing… and blood touches the sangrite…”

“I get it. Ka-boom. Splat. How in the hells did you talk me into this?”

“By not… telling you about it…”

“Y’know, real friends don’t keep secrets.”

“How would… you know?”

“Awww…”

“Here’s a plan…” I gritted. The needle had reached the wall of my aortal arch. “Before we take our swing at Bolas… you tell me your secrets, and I’ll tell you mine.”

“What secrets do I have?”

“You’ll be surprised.” I closed my eyes, and with one spasm of will, I stabbed the needle through the wall of the aorta so that its tip entered the largest flow point in my entire bloodstream.

Doc said, “Golghhg…”

I agreed. The needle seemed to be impinging on a nerve cluster. I felt the stab again with every beat of my heart.

“All right,” I said. Pain, yes. But: no shortness of breath, no faintness, no tachycardia-probably hadn’t torn the aortal wall, or not badly, at any rate. “All right. So far so good.”

“I hate when you say that.”

“Now comes the tricky part.”

“Now?” Doc sounded appalled. “What was that last part, then?”

“That was the ‘difficult but probably won’t kill us’ part.”

“Oog. That means this part-”

“Is really damned tricky. Yes.”

I took a deep breath. “This is how it’s going to work. This sangrite seems to be the next best thing to solid mana. And concentrated. Activated by contact with blood. Instead of jamming a crystal straight through my skin and setting another part of me on fire, I believe that a very, very fine powder fed directly into my bloodstream might distribute the reaction throughout my body in a controlled fashion-so I can use its power without blowing myself apart.”

“Come again? You want to mainline powdered dragon blood?”

“More than mainline. I am equipping the etherium needle with very, very tiny grinding gears, that very, very slowly crush the sangrite as it’s fed into my aorta. If it works the way I’m hoping, the dust particles will spread through my whole body in a few seconds.”

“This sounds like a really bad idea.”

“It is.”

“I am not okay with this.”

“You don’t get a vote.”

“Like hells-”

“It’s already done,” I said. “I did it while I was describing it to you. Stop me now and you’ll burn us to death.”

“Damn it, Tezz!” he shouted furiously, loud enough to make my ear buzz. “We just talked about this kind of crap!”

“No. We were going to talk about it,” I said, extending my arms as each and every hair on my body stood on end, crackling with spits of energy discharge. “That conversation will take place in a future that’ll never happen.”

“What’s that? Is it working, or are we dying?”

“Both.” The hissing in my ears swelled to a full-on hurricane. Arcs of blinding white lightning writhed and sizzled from my hands to the floor, to the walls, to my head. More power than I’d ever felt. Far more than I knew what to do with-but to do nothing was not an option. If I tried to restrain this power, I’d detonate like that sculler.

I felt my blood go fizzy. I felt my heart begin to boil. My brain would be next.

I let the power lift me up from the cavern’s floor. I let it clothe me in searing light. Seeking the Glass Dune, where a transit gate would be standing near two etherium gravity sleds, I sent forth my mind…

And I could say only, “Ohhh…”

“What is it?” Doc said, shouting to make himself heard over the hurricane in my head. “What do you see?”

Hanging in the air, bound to the cavern with chains of lightning, I breathed, “Everything… ” because that is exactly what I saw.

Everything.

I saw the mountains of Jund, the jungles of Naya, the golden plains of Bant, the endless oceans of Esper, and the smoking hellscape that was Grixis. I saw leotau-mounted lancers crashing through a formation of scourge devils while the skies above them were filled with shrieking death struggles between angels and kathari. I saw a hundred stormcallers on the Cliffs of Ot, chanting as they diverted the winds of the Eternal Storm to buffet back flight after flight of swooping dragons. I saw whole armies of elves and humans hurling storms of griffins, hydrae, and chimeras against massed formations of infantry whose armor blazed like the sun itself, while leonin shook flashing weaponry and roared their challenge to the champions of their enemies. I saw Sharuum in her chambers, Nicol Bolas brooding in Grixis, my father collapsed in his hovel…

And I saw the transit gate beside the gravity sleds in the Glass Dunes, where Silas Renn stretched out a hand, and the artifact he held blasted power at the back of an unsuspecting Baltrice.

“Hang on, Doc,” I said, my voice sounding very far away, half buried in the howling hurricane inside me. “It looks like we’re going to be a little late.”

“ ‘Better late than never,’ ” Doc shrieked into the wind, “is just a bloody figure of speech!”

The power blasting outward through my skin allowed no time for a conventional teleport, but I didn’t need to use one. Power was its own answer: with power such as this, I could reach out like Nicol Bolas himself and simply yank and rip and squeeze reality into the shape of my desire. I seized that part of Esper’s existence in the grip of my mind, then dragged it close so that I could pass from the cavern to the desert with a single step.

My arrival cracked the sky.

Through the rip I came, blazing in the air dozens of yards above them. The light from my body whited out the colors of the desert, Baltrice and the sleds, and the hand Renn had raised to shield his eyes.

I spoke in thunderclaps.

“I BELIEVE YOU’VE BEEN EXPECTING ME.”